I’m an avid reader of Brain Pickings (check it out if you haven’t heard of it), and one thing caught my attention a few weeks ago. In the mid-1930’s a young writer by the name of Arnold Samuelson caught up with his hero, Ernest Hemingway. Rather then cast him away, Hemingway took him on as a sort of protege, and gave him some invaluable writing advice along the way. There was one thing that resonated with me in particular because I find myself in this trap all the time.
The most important thing Ive learned about writing is never write too much at a time Never pump yourself dry. Leave a little for the next day. The main thing is to know when to stop. Dont wait till youve written yourself out. When youre still going good and you come to an interesting place and you know whats going to happen next, thats the time to stop. Then leave it alone and dont think about it; let your subconscious mind do the work.
I mostly write code for a living, not prose. But this rule still applies. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been coding away when I finally get myself to a good place. Everything’s perfect. The bug is patched, the feature is solid.
Then I go just a little bit further. And that’s when I blow it. I get frustrated and lost. My motivation goes into free-fall and I alternate between my code editor and Twitter every five seconds. And no it’s late. It’s dinner time, or my wife is calling me, or the office is closing.
So don’t be me. Take Hemingway’s advice. It doesn’t matter if you have a little extra time, find that place where you still have some juice left and just stop. If you really need to keep going, go over the code you just wrote and refactor a bit. Or look at the next step enough to get pumped about it, but don’t write any code. When you get up and walk away from your computer, the levers in your brain will keep moving, even when you sleep through the night.
The next morning, when youve had a good sleep and youre feeling fresh, rewrite what you wrote the day before. When you come to the interesting place and you know what is going to happen next, go on from there and stop at another high point of interest. That way, when you get through, your stuff is full of interesting places and when you write a novel you never get stuck and you make it interesting as you go along. Every day go back to the beginning and rewrite the whole thing and when it gets too long, read at least two or three chapters before you start to write and at least once a week go back to the start. That way you make it one piece.
More sound advice. When you start up again fresh, instead of jumping straight into a problem, go back over the work you did the day previous. Take 10 or 15 minutes and tweak little things, just enough to get the ball rolling. When you start developing the next step, you’ll already be in a good place. And by going back over code you’ve written before, you can make sure to keep things fluid and connected.
I’ve started to do this (when possible) and it feels really code. All of this, of course, requires nice blocks of time devoted to your tasks, not distracted by email and social media and meetings. That can be tough, but it is well worth it. You might not write For Whom the Bell Tolls, but your code will be a lot better for it. Give it a go.
